Targeting location

Location Options

There are two options to configure and selecting the right settings for your situation is crucial. The “target” setting allows you to select who will see your ad based upon locations you’ve added to target while the “exclude” setting allows you to choose which people will be excluded. Exclusions are only required if there is an area within the selected target you do not want your ads to show for. A good example of this is if you are an authorized distributor for products in the state of Texas excluding Houston. You can target “Texas” and exclude “Houston.” Note that you do not need to worry about the exclude setting if you don’t include location exclusions in your campaign.

Target Location

Option #1 – “people in, or who show interest in, your targeted locations (recommended)”

This default setting will show your ad to people inside of your target area and people that search using a location-based keyword that falls within your target area. Let’s say you offer an adventure tour in Pheonix. It makes perfect sense to target people that live in the local area and people that live elsewhere that are looking for a “Pheonix adventure tour” because they are most likely planning to visit.

Option #2 – “people in or regularly in your targeted locations”

This setting will show your ad to people inside of your target area and people that are frequently in your target area (even if they are currently outside of your target location). Let’s say you offer home renovations in Pheonix. In this case, you only want this offer to appear to people that are residents of Pheonix. This setting would apply to any situation where you don’t want to provide your services to people that live outside of your target area… home services is a great example. Even if somebody searches for “Pheonix home renos” you probably aren’t interested in them as a customer if they live many hours outside of the city.

This is the setting we use for about 95% of our client campaigns.

Option #3 – “people searching for your targeted locations”

This setting will show your ad to people that include the location in keywords they are searching for. Importantly, this means that somebody in your target area will not see your ads unless they include a location qualifier… even if they type in keywords you are targeting. A good use case for this is if you want to improve your conversion rates without having to expand your keyword strategy; kind of the lazy man’s way to do keyword/ad group location targeting. Use this sparingly though, if you are in a small niche or have a relatively big budget. Remember that most people looking for a plumber for an urgent issue will simply search for “emergency plumber” rather than “emergency plumber in Pheonix.”

Exclude Location

Option #1 – “people in, or who show interest in, your excluded locations (recommended)”

This is the default setting and it will ensure that people in this location as well as anybody that includes that location qualifier in a search term won’t see your ad. This is appropriate for most situations.

Option #2 – “people in your excluded locations”

This setting will ensure that people in your excluded location won’t see your ad. If somebody outside of this location includes the location in their search query your ad may still be shown to them.

Different Ways To Set Locations

Named Locations

A pretty simple concept; type in the name of a country, state, province, city, town, region, commonly named area and select from the pop-up list. Enter as many places as you like. Have a long list of places in a spreadsheet or other document. Pop open the advanced search, select “bulk locations,” and paste your list into the box provided.

Zip/Postal Codes

Google supports selecting a range of zip/postal codes for most countries. This can be particularly useful if you used to send snail mail to a particular range of zip codes and are replacing that campaign with AdWords. Or, you might use this in support of a snail mail campaign. Start typing the zip code into Google and select the range from the pop-up list.

Neilson DMA Regions

Neilson ratings are segmented locations where Neilson tracks television watching habits. It is also how TV ads are segmented by location. This will pop-up automatically when you type a matching named area into the location search window. If you’re coordinating your campaign with television spots, this is exactly what you need.

Radius Targeting

This one is perfect is you have a physical store or location that people visit, or if you want to limit your travel range when delivering a service. Set your location and then choose the furthest distance (radius) away that you want to cover. One great trick here is that you can set up different ranges from your location and then apply bid adjustments according to how far it is away, bidding less as your potential clients live further away. This is an excellent way to expand your advertising reach while maintaining a profitable cost per conversion. Google’s “new experience” also supports using a pin for high precision targeting.

Areas Of Interest

This advanced search lets select places of interest such as an airport or university name. There are some great specific applications for this such as taxi services (airports) or products for students (universities).

Using The Map

The map will show you the locations you have targeted and excluded. You can click on a selected area to remove it or add “nearby” locations to expand your target area – pretty simple.